The philosophical wreckage they have been excavating has generally come to be called "neoliberalism." It is a word which confuses many people, because it serves as a name for a set of economic beliefs and policies which are more easily recognized as being associated with political conservatism and libertarianism: the opening of the Wikipedia entry on "neoliberalism" is accurate enough on these economic beliefs and policies, which "include extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy." Generally, neoliberals believe that markets with untrammeled pricing mechanisms are a much fairer and more efficient means of allocating society's resources than any level of government oversight and intervention.

Neoliberals themselves actively seek to add to the confusion by denying they have a shared, coherent philosophy. A good, recent example—and from someone who is a self-professed "liberal" not a conservative—was this comment on DailyKos this past week: “Neoliberalism is not actually a thing.” It is exactly what neo-liberals
themselves say. It is a smokescreen, intended to confuse and stymie
inquiry. Philip Mirowski, a historian of economic thought at Notre Dame,
and co-editor of one of the best expositions of neo-liberalism (The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Harvard University Press, 2009; now available in paperback), took on this deception earlier this year in a paper entitled, The Political Movement that Dared not Speak its own Name.

Mirowski’s response to the severe reaction of neoliberals to his paper was posted to Naked Capitalism in April 2016: Philip Mirowski: This is Water, or Is It the Neoliberal Thought Collective?
I do not recommend anyone go read the above links right now, unless
you are already familiar with the debate over neoliberalism and are
prepared for some hefty intellectual lifting. For those people
unfamiliar with the term “neoliberalism” and seeking to understand how
it differs from liberalism, I recommend this excellent review of another
book, including many of the comments in the thread, on
Naked Capitalism
in March 2015: Comments on David Harvey’s “A Brief History of Neoliberalism”.

These are all excellent discussions and expositions of neoliberalism. Also excellent is the work of Corey Robin. See, for example, When Neoliberalism Was Young: A Lookback on Clintonism before Clinton, from April 2016, and Robin's response to critics. Robin puts his finger on a diseased main artery in our political discourse today, when he writes neoliberals, even those, such as Barack Obama and the Clintons, who refuse to call themselves neoliberals,

would recoil in horror at the policies and programs of mid-century
liberals like Walter Reuther or John Kenneth Galbraith or even Arthur
Schlesinger, who claimed that “class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination.”

My own conclusion thus far is that much confusion will persist until neoliberalism is understood in the historical context of USA political economy, along with three other terms crucial to
understanding this history:

Mercantilism

Republicanism

and

Liberalism.

My firm conviction is that people cannot, and do not, understand what an insidious, and potent, danger neoliberalism thought is, until they understand republicanism. And in political economy, you also need to understand mercantilism, and how the USA theory and practice of republicanism interacted with, and changed, mercantilism. As for liberalism, for now suffice it to note that contemporary neoliberal thought has more to do with economic liberalism, than it does political liberalism. In fact, to some extent—and at the risk of my only adding further to the confusion—it may be useful to assert here that there is a strain of European political liberalism that developed in opposition to the USA theory and practice of republicanism. This strain of European political liberalism resulted in granting the right to vote to most subjects of polities which remained monarchies, as an expedient for the necessity imposed by modern warfare for mass mobilization of a country's male population. The obvious period is that of World War One. In USA, at similar type of political liberalism arose in response to the acquisition and consolidation
of monopolistic economic power by the trusts led by John D. Rockefeller,
the Morgan banking interests, and other misnamed, so called "captains
of industry" of the Gilded Age.

In my Introduction to my annotated abridgement of The Power to Govern: The Constitution -- Then and Now, by Douglass Adair and Walton H. Hamilton (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, NY, 1937, available on Amazon as a Kindle ebook, here), I write that the creation the American republic and its Constitution must be understood in the

context of the shift from the economic and political systems of
feudalism, to mercantilism and modern nationalism. The ecclesiastical
and warlord authoritarianism of feudal Europe was being reluctantly and
painfully dragged off the stage of world history, making way for
national states. In the process, these national states
developed—without, Hamilton and Adair note, much theoretical
foundation—an accretion of laws and policies generally called mercantilism,
intended to ensure economic activity added to, rather than detracted
from, a nation’s wealth and power. Hamilton and Adair present the
evidence that the Framers were entirely familiar with mercantilist
policies, and that the intent behind the Constitution was most
emphatically not laissez faire and unregulated market
capitalism, but a careful and deliberate plan to ensure that all
economic activity was channeled and directed to the promotion of the
general welfare and national development….
The words “mercantilist” and “mercantilism” are generally used
whenever government powers are used to promote a state’s economic
powers. By specifying in the Constitution that government powers are
used to promote a state’s economic powers in promotion of the general welfare,
the American republic made a sharp break from European mercantilism, in
which the welfare of a sole monarch or small group of oligarchs was
often conflated with the general welfare of a state or nation….

As a body of economic thought, liberalism developed as the economic and political philosophy of a revolt by a rising middle class
against the power and privileges of European ruling oligarchs and
monarchs, who used their connections and influence at royal courts to
gain economic monopolies and other privileges (in other words, the system
of mercantilism.) The intent of classical
economic liberalism was to sweep away, or at least greatly circumscribe, the power of these oligarchical and
monarchical elites and states to make room for greater economic freedoms and
property rights for the rising middle class.

In this sense, the culmination of liberalism was the creation of the American
republic, However—let me stress again—it is crucial to note that under
the Constitution of the new American republic, economic freedoms and
property rights were subject to the Constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare.

In advanced industrial economies, the way a sovereign nation-state
promotes and protects the general welfare is by imposing environmental,
workplace, and consumer regulations on economic activity.
This is where we should discuss the concept of republicanism.
Remember, the United States is established as a republic, not as a
democracy. But what does that mean?

In a monumental book that is crucial to understanding the historical and cultural context we are here examining, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), Gordon Wood wrote, "Republicanism meant more for Americans than simply the elimination of a
king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension,
a utopian depth, to the political separation from England - a depth that
involved the very character of their society."

Wood continues:

To eighteenth-century American and European radicals alike, living
in a world of monarchies, it seemed only too obvious that the great deficiency
of existing governments was precisely their sacrificing of the public good
to the private greed of small ruling groups.... The sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed
the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic
goal of their Revolution.... "The word republic,"
said Thomas Paine, "means the public good, or the good of the
whole, in contradistinction to the despotic form, which makes the good of
the sovereign, or of one man, the only object of the government."

(The first two thirds of "Republicanism," Chapter II from Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, has been posted online here. I highly recommend it as a very productive and uplifting Sunday read. Also, here is the Wiki-summary of the entire book.)

In the closing decades of the 1700s, there was general agreement that
for republicanism to work as a system of government, the citizens of
the republic needed to be virtuous. There were two types of virtue:
private virtue and public virtue. Political theorists of the time
insisted that the two were intertwined, but for sake of brevity, we need
only look at public virtue, which simply
meant that an individual citizen was willing to suppress his or her own
self-interest when the greater good of society required it.

What this meant in practice was that individuals must submit to the authority of the state out of the self-abnegation which flowed from understanding—and desiring—that the consideration the general welfare must rule supreme. This required that the citizens develop an entirely different character than subjects in a monarchy, in which obedience to the state flowed from the awe and fear of the immense, regal power of the monarch and his supporting military apparatus. As Wood explains, loyalists warned that

by resting the whole structure of government
on the unmitigated willingness of the people to obey, the Americans were
making a truly revolutionary transformation in the structure of authority.
In shrill and despairing pamphlets [the Tories] insisted that the [Revolutionaries] ideas
were undermining the very principle of order. If respect and obedience to
the established governments were refused and if republicanism were adopted,
then... "the bands of society would
be dissolved, the harmony of the world confounded, and the order of nature
subverted." [The tories insisted that ]The principles of the Revolutionaries were
directed "clearly and literally against authority." They were
destroying "not only all authority over us as it now exists, but any
and all that it is possible to constitute." The Tory logic was indeed
frightening. Not only was the rebellion rupturing the people's habitual
obedience to the constituted government, but by the establishment of republicanism
the [Revolutionaries] were also founding their new governments solely on the people's
voluntary acquiescence. And, as Blackstone had pointed out, "obedience
is an empty name, if every individual has a right to decide how far he himself
shall obey." [Which of course, becomes the issue in the Civil War eight decades later.—AKW]

Wood points out that the Revolutionaries did not actually desire to do away with governmental and social authority, only to supplant what motivated obedience to them by changing the very character of the people, so that the motivating force came from within each citizen, instead of from outside.

The Revolution was designed to change the flow of authority-indeed the structure
of politics as the colonists had known it - but it was in no way intended
to do away with the principle of authority itself. "There must be,"
said John Adams in 1776, "a Decency, and Respect, and Veneration introduced
for Persons in Authority, of every Rank, or We are undone."

....In a monarchy each man's desire to do what was right in his own eyes could
be restrained by fear or force. In a republic, however, each man must somehow
be persuaded to submerge his personal wants into the greater good of the
whole. This willingness of the individual to sacrifice his private interests
for the good of the community - such patriotism or love of country - the
eighteenth century termed "public virtue." A republic was such
a delicate polity precisely because it demanded an extraordinary moral character
in the people. Every state in which the people participated needed a degree
of virtue; but a republic which rested solely on the people absolutely required
it... The eighteenth-century
mind was thoroughly convinced that a popularly based government "cannot
be supported without Virtue." Only with a public-spirited, self-sacrificing
people could the authority of a popularly elected ruler be obeyed, but "more
by the virtue of the people, than by the terror of his power." Because
virtue was truly the lifeblood of the republic, the thoughts and hopes surrounding
this concept of public spirit gave the Revolution its socially radical character
- an expected alteration in the very behavior of the people, "laying
the foundation in a constitution, not without or over, but within the subjects."

Wood and other historians have written that the adoption of the
Constitution came about because many Americans—most especially the
leaders of the Revolution—were increasingly horrified at the spectacle
of self-interest dominating the work of all the state legislatures. The
republican public virtue which had called forth the sacrifices of the
Revolutionary War, appeared to be ebbing, and there was a serious debate
over whether Americans remained virtuous enough for self-government to
survive. (See Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, Chapter Ten, “Vices of the System.”) Note that this perceived
diminution of virtue focused not only on the personal corruption of
individual state legislators, but also on how the various state
legislatures consistently and repeatedly placed state and regional
interests ahead of the national interest.

The most pronounced social effect of the Revolution was not harmony
or stability but the sudden appearance of new men everywhere in politics
and business. "When the pot boils, the scum will rise:' James Otis
had warned in 1776; but few Revolutionary leaders had realized just how
much it would rise....

Everywhere "Specious, interested designing men:' "men, respectable
neither for their property, their virtue, nor their abilities:' were taking
a lead in public affairs that they had never quite had before, courting
"the suffrages of the people by tantalizing them with improper indulgences."
Thousands of the most respectable people "who obtained their possessions
by the hard industry, continued sobriety and economy of themselves or their
virtuous ancestors" were now witnessing, so the writings of nearly
all the states proclaimed over and over, many men "whose fathers they
would have disdained to have sat with the dogs of their flocks, raised
to immense wealth, or at least to carry the appearance of a haughty, supercilious
and luxurious spendthrift." "Effrontery and arrogance, even in
our virtuous and enlightened days:' said John Jay "are giving rank
and Importance to men whom Wisdom would have left in obscurity."....

The republican emphasis on talent and merit in place of connections and favor now seemed perverted, becoming identified simply with the ability to garner votes....

The self-sacrifice and patriotism of 1774-75 [had] seemed to give way to greed and profiteering at the expense of the public good. Perhaps, it was suggested, that peculiar-expression of virtue in those few years before Independence had been simply the consequence of a momentary period of danger. At one time public spirit had been "the governing principle and distinguishing characteristic of brave Americans. But where was it now? Directly the reverse. We daily see the busy multitude.engaged in. accumulating what thy fondly call riches, by forestalling [buy up goods in order to profit to achieve a monopoly position and impose an artificially high price], extortioning and imposing upon each other... Everywhere "Private Interest seemed to predominate over every Consideration that regarded the public weal.

The leaders who later became known as Federalists assembled in
the Constitutional Convention, and cobbled together a framework of
government of checks and balances intended to safeguard the republic
against both the machinations of a tyrant, and the passions of the
masses. I think the left is making a huge, tragic mistake by focusing an
the founders’ fear of democracy, and condemning the founders as mere elitists. I would point to Trump and the Republican Convention as an
example of exactly why the Founders sought to curb the power of both a
tyrant, and the people. I agree with Ian Welsh that Trump just might get elected,
because Hillary and Democratic establishment behind her refuse to acknowledge the
economic devastation caused by their neoliberalism over the past four
decades. So, if Trump gets elected, it is going to be the Founders'
framework of checks and balances we are going to desperately seize hold
of to try and prevent Trump from going to the very end that his
supporters want him to go to. Will lefties come to appreciate the
Founders' concerns then? A few will, but I think most will not.

But, back to American history. So, we get the republic, and it is
generally understood that for republican self-government to work, the
people with public virtue must lead the government. This is why George
Washington was elected President unanimously twice by the electoral
college. Note that by the time of Washington’s second election to
President, in 1792, the political fight between the Federalists, led by
Hamilton, and the anti-Federalists (soon to be called Republicans), led
by Jefferson and Madison, had broken into the open, but both factions
supported Washington for President, because only he was perceived to be virtuous beyond question. (In his second term, Jefferson and Madison
led a campaign of vitriol and lies against Washington that is truly
astonishing, accusing Washington of being a mere dupe of Hamilton, and
surrounding himself in regal splendor intended to prepare Americans’ sentiments for an abandonment of republicanism and its replacement by
a monarchy. And this, while Jefferson continued to serve as
Vice-President.)

So what happens is the very idea of public virtue comes under attack. As Wood writes:

In these repeated attacks on deference and the capacity of a conspicuous
few to speak for the whole society-which was to become in time the distinguishing
feature of American democratic politics - the Antifederalists struck at
the roots of the traditional conception of political society. If the natural
elite, whether its distinctions were ascribed or acquired, was not in any
organic way connected to the "feelings, circumstances, and interests"
of the people and was incapable of feeling "sympathetically the wants
of the people," then it followed that only ordinary men, men not distinguished
by the characteristics of aristocratic wealth and taste, men "in middling
circumstances" untempted by the attractions of a cosmopolitan world
and thus "more temperate, of better morals, and less ambitious, than
the great," could be trusted to speak for the great body of the people,
for those who were coming more and more to be referred to as "the
middling and lower classes of people." The differentiating influence
of the environment was such that men in various ranks and classes now seemed
to be broken apart from one another, separated by their peculiar circumstances
into distinct, unconnected, and often incompatible interests. With their
indictment of aristocracy the Antifederalists were saying, whether they
realized it or not, that the people of America even in their several states
were not homogeneous entities each with a basic similarity of interest
for which an empathic elite could speak. Society was not an organic hierarchy
composed of ranks and degrees indissolubly linked one to another; rather
it was a heterogeneous mixture of "many different classes or orders
of people, Merchants, Farmers, Planter Mechanics and Gentry or wealthy
Men. "In such a society men from one class or group, however educated
and respectable they may have been, could never be acquainted with the
"Situation and Wants" of those of another class or group. Lawyers
and planters could never be "adequate judges of tradesmens concerns."
If men were truly to represent the people in government, it was not enough
for them to be for the people; they had to be actually of the people. "Farmers,
traders and mechanics . . . all ought to have a competent number of their
best informed members in the legislature "

The anti-Federalist basically argue that no individual can ever set
aside their own self-interests to achieve the level of public virtue (disinterest
is a key word to look for if you read accounts of this period) required
to govern the republic. Well, if the leaders of government are just as
selfish and self-interested as you and I, we are therefore just as
capable of governing as they are, and all this talk about the leaders
being virtuous is a deception.

So, in this historical context, neoliberalism is a revolt against
the very heart of the republican philosophy of the American republic. Neoliberalism is a philosophical insistence that public virtue is a dangerous encumbrance on the "animal spirits" of modern capitalism—never mind that nowhere in the USA Constitution is "capitalism" mentioned, or any particular economic structure mandated. (Back in 1982, the
American Enterprise Institute had a forum and published a book How Capitalistic is the Constitution? All the contributors except one never really addressed the question, instead regurgitating the usual hosannas to British imperial apologists Adam Smith and John Locke. The one exception was historian Forrest McDonald,
who wrote an excellent biography of Alexander Hamilton—excellent because
McDonald understands the important stuff about political economy and not the neoliberal
crap—wrote one of the papers in the book, and his answer, in short, is “not
very.” As in, the Constitution does not create a capitalist economy at all.
Now, I suspect McDonald pulled his punches, because he did not want to too
greatly upset his AEI hosts. McDonald'spaper is probably the only completely truthful thing AEI has ever published.)

In fact, the leading philosophers of neoliberalsim are explicit in their attack on the Constitutional mandate to promote the general welfare,
arguing it is “the slippery slope to the tyranny of the nanny state.”
As Friedrich von Hayek titled his 1944 paean to neo-liberalism, the
republican insistence of promoting the general welfare is The Road to Serfdom. Philip Pilkington, in The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part I – Hayek’s Delusion (January 2013) makes the astute observation

Hayek thought that all totalitarianisms had their origins in forms of
economic planning. Economic planning was the cause of totalitarianism
for Hayek, rather than the being just a feature of it. Underneath it all
this was a rather crude argument. One may as well make the observation
that totalitarianism was often accompanied by arms build-up, therefore
arms build-ups “cause” totalitarianism.

Von Hayek and his fellow Austrian aristocrats who were forced to flee
from the fruits of their economic programs, did a complete revision of
history and retold that same story as if the very opposite of reality
had happened. Once they were safely in England and America, sponsored
and funded by oligarch grants, hacks like von Mises and von Hayek
started pushing a revisionist history of the collapse of Weimar Germany
blaming not their austerity measures, but rather big-spending liberals
who were allegedly in charge of Germany’s last government. Somehow, von
Hayek looked at Chancellor Bruning’s policies of massive budget cuts
combined with pegging the currency to the gold standard, the policies
that led to Weimar Germany’s collapse, policies that became the
cornerstone of Hayek’s cult—and decided that Bruning hadn’t existed.

In USA, neoliberals who openly self-identify as political conservatives or libertarians don't even have sense enough to try to hide their hideous historical holocausts, like von Hayek and von Mises try to. I have already discussed the importance and significance of the mandate to promote the General Welfare in the USA Constitution. The Confederacy
(yes, that Confederacy, of the mid-1800s, dominated by an oligarchy of rich slaveholders who decided to tear apart the Union in a fratricidal war rather than do a single thing that might lead to eventual elimination of slavery) largely copied the USA Constitution, but, crucially, eliminated mention
of the General Welfare from its Constitution. The libertarian von Mises
Institute has a June 1992 article on its website by Randall G. Holcombe which explicitly states this was an important “improvement”:

But the differences in the documents, small as they are, are
extremely important. The people who wrote the Southern Constitution had
lived under the federal one. They knew its strengths, which they tried
to copy, and its weaknesses, which they tried to eliminate.
One grave weakness in the U.S. Constitution is the "general welfare"
clause, which the Confederate Constitution eliminated….

The Southern drafters thought the general welfare clause was an open
door for any type of government intervention. They were, of course,
right.

Immediately following that clause in the Confederate Constitution is a
clause that has no parallel in the U.S. Constitution. It affirms strong
support for free trade and opposition to protectionism: "but no bounties
shall be granted from the Treasury; nor shall any duties or taxes on
importation from foreign nations be laid to promote or foster any branch
of industry."
….The Confederate Constitution prevents Congress from appropriating
money "for any internal improvement intended to facilitate commerce"
except for improvement to facilitate waterway navigation. But "in all
such cases, such duties shall be laid on the navigation facilitated
thereby, as may be necessary to pay for the costs and expenses
thereof..."

So much for the conservative and libertarian brands of neoliberals. What about those neoliberals who self-identify on today's accepted political spectrum as liberals or even progressives, such as Barack Obama and the Clintons? In The Origins of Neoliberalism, Part II – The Americanisation of Hayek’s Delusion, Pilkington details how the ideas of neoliberalism came to completely dominate the economics profession and academia. (Also see the July 2009 Adbusters—the people who conceived of Occupy Wall Street—attack on the leading economics textbook, authored by Harvard economist and head of George W. Bush Jr.'s Council of Economic Advisors, H. Gregory Mankiw.) The result is that very, very few people have been exposed to, let alone learned, any alternative to the economic nostrums of neoliberalis. It is not that Obama and the Clintons have a malignant intent to impose economic ruin on their country and fellow countrymen, it's just that they are profoundly ignorant in matters of political economy—and, I would venture to guess, the history of republicanism. As William Neal explains, it is this socially pervasive indoctrination in neoliberalism that prevents "almost the entire Democratic Party short of Senator Sanders and a few members of the Progressive Caucus" from pushing for such things as a government direct jobs program. They simply accept the "common wisdom"

that “only the private sector can create jobs.” In order to believe
this fiction, one does indeed have to bury the history of the New Deal,
which is the still barely breathing historical legacy which refutes it
(along with the domestic production record during World War II), the
Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA’s public work projects now
nearly erased from citizen memory.

The problem neoliberalism confronts us with is the means by which a people decide and carry into practice their preferred vision for their economic destiny as a nation. If the neoliberals are correct, then there is no room for visionaries of a better future for everyone, because the purest collective expression of the wills of all individual are the sum of transactions in the economic markets. At the time of the Revolution and the writing of the Constitution, this was known as Bernard Mandelville's "private vices lead to public virtue," which became Adam Smith's "invisible hand." And every book I've read about these matters noted that Americans at the time repeatedly and emphatically rejected Mandelville's idea.

In a sense, the past half-century of theoretical and policy dominance by neoliberalism has been a colossal social experiment in replacing the public virtue of republicanism, with the economic liberalism of a market economy. By any measure I care about, the experiment has been a disastrous failure. A solid majority of citizens have repeatedly told pollsters they desire an end to a dependence on fossil fuels, and a solution to the problem of climate change, but no effective responses have been delivered from a political system held in thrall to neoliberal ideas. The very idea of government intervention into the economy to achieve such goals is held by the neoliberal ideologues to be a mis-allocation of resources and an encroachment by government on the "liberties of the people" But if the citizens cannot use their government—the government that supposedly derives its powers from their consent, and which therefore professes its sovereignty to reside in the people—to impose their will on "the market," then what instrument do they have to decide their own destiny?

Neoliberalism is the new justification for the newly arisen class of
corporatist oligarchs and plutocrats who are enraged that the promotion
of the general welfare by modern sovereign nation-states involves laws
and regulations which “stifle” their “business opportunities” and
“economic creativity.”